Tony French

sound

Inundated is not quite overwhelmed
But a piling up of syllables
Like parcels at the door in the hallway
Inside the threshhold, under the doormat
Date-stamped, demanding to be unwrapped
Lest their delicate paper clothes be saturated
By the sudden bursting of a pipe in the plumbing.
And all the gifts and well-wishes
All the bills and monthly subscriptions
The bargains bought on eBay and the postcards from afar
The money-back offers and hand-delivered love-notes
Are flooded by an urgency that will not wait.
The stream of time asserts its indifference
To all the chopped-up categories of your life & circumstance
And the blood of one’s being rises up in a bloom
That irrigates and suffuses and will not be refused
And overwhelms – no boundaries unbroken,
No corners uncovered, no dusty dead dreams left dry.
And all the demands and delays, datings and dotings
Are drowned – in a slipstream of sound and spirit.
Bloodwaters in an emergency that unblocks the gates
And I dissolve in the immediacy of this flow
Of the Word spoken speaking and the sound
Given its very human location in this Universe around.
19-3-2016